Tag Archives: infosec

In an alternate universe, I’d be heading to New York Tuesday for CE Week, but I had a panel invitation here and none there. I also recalled how low-key last year’s conference was, so I decided to stick around here after I’d already put in for a press pass. To everybody who’s pitched me about their CE Week exhibits or events (which seem to be more numerous than last year’s): Sorry!

Yet another net-neutrality post? Yes. This one covered two angles I had not addressed adequately before. One is how Internet providers’ own deployment figures show they’ve kept on expanding their networks after the advent of open-Internet rules. The other is the poor odds of a small ISP getting the time of day from a major streaming-media service, much less inking a paid-prioritization deal that would yield enough money to finance broadband buildout.

It’s been years since I last uploaded any pictures to Photobucket, but only a decade ago it led the market for online image sharing. Its subsequent descent into a) becoming an ad-choked hell and b) demanding that free users who had accepted its invitation to embed their photos elsewhere switch to paying $400 a year is sad on a lot of levels.

Once again, the Nationals are headed to the postseason. Since our last two bouts of October baseball ended badly–the excruciating game 5 of the 2012 NLDS still haunts me–and the team has gotten whacked with injuries lately, I’m not super-optimistic about this one. Fortunately, I have the election to distract me by providing an alternate source of stress.

First I thought this post would be a great opportunity to use a still image of the printer-execution scene from “Office Space,” then I realized there was a good point to be made about the risks of using automatic security updates to deal with business-model problems. Two days later, HP confessed that it “should have done a better job of communicating” about the software update that disabled some third-party ink cartridges and said it would provide an optional patch to disable the offending feature.

I wrote a quick recap of the cybersecurity issues that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could have gone over during Monday’s debate. Will these topics get a reasoned discussion during the two other debates? I’m going to say no.

My role in this conference for business-school PR and communications types was to speak briefly about what I cover, then answer questions from attendees. As the one freelancer speaking, I could offer a different perspective than my fellow panelists, all full-time staff: Economist finance editor Tom Easton, the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, CNN national correspondent Ryan Nobles and Marketplace Radio education reporter Amy Scott.

(Zurcher and I not only went to Georgetown, the conference venue, but worked together at the Georgetown Voice. You can imagine my disappointment that nobody in the audience asked “how did you all get into journalism?”)

Right after my editor asked me to revisit this question, I had two different people show per-app data usage details on their iPhones that had not been reset since 2013, making them useless for getting a sense of how much data they should get. Apple, please fix that feature so the count resets once a month.

I don’t know if I’m going to convince anybody with this, but the small extra wait to have an EMV chip-card payment read–far less time than I lose to checkout lines–doesn’t bother me much. I do, however, appreciate being able to pay with plastic overseas without getting funny looks or (most of the time) having my card rejected by a ticket-vending machine.

I started writing this story months ago as a general guide to staying secure while staying connected overseas, but I kept putting it off. And then FBI director James Comey’s conclusion of the Bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s reliance on a private e-mail server as Secretary of State noted that she used this mail service while traveling “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Boom, news peg.

I tried to make clear in the piece how many mysteries remained about the security of this setup, but all of those subtleties apparently went over the head of the commenters accusing Clinton of treason or worse. (For a while, the comments were topped by a particularly unhinged gem from an avowed 9/11 Truther.) Clinton Derangement Syndrome seems alive and unwell.

I did the math for those plans and identified a few cases in which a current VzW subscriber could save some money by switching to them. This story, unlike Wednesday’s, featured a non-toxic comments thread that already includes some replies by me.